[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
bug#17546: Problem with du
From: |
Dale R. Worley |
Subject: |
bug#17546: Problem with du |
Date: |
Thu, 22 May 2014 12:21:26 -0400 |
> From: Paul Eggert <address@hidden>
> As far as I can see, POSIX doesn't allow the old behavior, but does
> allow the new one.
I looked at what I think is the Posix spec for du
(http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/du.html#tag_20_36),
and I don't see anything that covers the situation one way or another,
but there may be additional relevant information that I'm not aware
of.
> > This leads to startlingly odd behaviors
>
> Any choice of behavior for 'du' will lead to odd behaviors sometimes,
> and there's no way we can make everybody happy in all cases. There is
> an important technical advantage of du's current behavior, though; you
> can get the behavior you prefer by running "du X; du Y". If we chaned
> du to reset itself between command-line arguments, there'd be no way to
> get the behavior I prefer, which is to count files just once.
OTOH, what I want "du *" to generate has to be done with "for F in * ;
do du $F ; done", which is pretty annoying.
I'd like to suggest adding another option to du to establish the
behavior I want. It would be a weaker-grade of -l. (I shouldn't have
any trouble writing the code for that.) Also, I think a few
additional sentences in the manual page would make du's behavior
clearer.
Dale